an anti-social framing of ~~technical~~ disability
this talk explores what happens when we stop treating accessibility as a purely technical concern; how data visualizations and other technical communications could consider what is seen, what is hidden, and who is invited into the work, as modern art does.
this perspective offers a way to understand accessibility not as an afterthought or a checklist, but as a creative and relational practice.
through this lens, the talk invites folks to experiment with art and reproduction as a method for rethinking technical practice. making art, even imperfectly, cultivates questions that could be used to bring accessibility earlier into the process:
a dissonance with the rules and environments we're social in
marshall mchluhan's the medium is the massage
the poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted,"
they cannot go along with currents and trends.
A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.
This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story,
"the emperor's new clothes." "well-adjusted" courtiers, having vested interests, save the emperor as beautifully appointed.
the "antisocial" brat, unaccustomed to the old environments, clearly saw that the emperor "ain't got nothing on."
the new environment was clearly visible to them.
this talk was developed on an island, and it takes effort to leave its pastoral silence.
accessibility
the technical parts of disability, physical and digital
i appreciate the opportunity to discuss art with you at the aptly named CREATE seminar series.
today, we'll look through modern, post-modern, and contemporary art technologies as means to making difficult concepts accessible.
i'm going to show a lot in a short time; this talk is chock full of links and content you can revisit later.
it makes me happy to leave the island to be here, to share my passions art and science:
i get to revisit so many beautiful things, appreciate where i've been, and find new meaning in works.
presentations challenge my accessibility practice.
i get to encourage folks to appreciate, make, and open themselves up to art.
i often think of alexander calder making his moving sculptures and his unique perspective embedded inside the work.
sometimes, this feeling hits me the strongest when i am working with data zooming in and out of it.
magritte was treading in ambiguity, too, and he had a different technique to
disrupt the hierarchy and order of figures and texts.
his primary media was painting, and eventually sculpture, and these media proved effective
at clarifying ambiguity.
in the early 20th century ferdindand de saussure and charles pierce began semiotics theories that study signs.
in these theories they discovered interfaces that complicate representation:
there is ambiguity between the signifier and signified.
the position of the viewer matters
this is a major problem for technical and scientific enterprises where language is its entirety,
and modern art continually finds ways to resolve these ambiguities.
for accessibility, language can be a poor technology for communicating the lived experiences of disabled people and assistive technology users. this is where we look to other media to find clarity in the ambiguities.
... is foucault's analysis of magritte's work, specifically, he is trying to locate the text in the work.
and, spoiler alert: you can't smoke a painting.
there are two chapters relevent to the intersections of art, data, and accessibility.
And yet Magritte' s art is not foreign to the enterprise of
Klee and Kandinsky. Rather it constitutes, facing
them and on the basis of a system common to them
all, a figure at once opposed and complementary.
foucault compares the efforts of magritte to that of klee and kandinsky.
klee's dots that went for a walk eventually move like text,
and the kandisky's synesthetic writings and education on the color harmony of points, lines and planes.
all of their impacts are textual, and digital accessibility is a textual problem.
Many of her works were strongly influenced by chemical engineering, and especially the field’s graphs which depicted physical properties of substances. Leiteritz’s paintings typically reworked a mundane graph using large expanses of colour and a bold abstract theme, changing it into a dynamic painting. Other works are reminiscent of Bunsen burner flame or DNA gel.
Then she devoted herself to diagrams of how they encountered her in her work. She artistically converted the technical drawings into oil.
She designed with colors, with backgrounds, with details.
she was interested in chemical engineering and fully involved with her data. she generated her data, typeset her data, and painted her data.
through this intimate experience with different modes of representations we can imagine that margaret felt her work more.
she engaged more of her senses then we may now. these are practices we should be able to recover if coding systems help us make the productivity gains they promise.
margaret's works are standalone works of art. however, it is important to look to history to find that she studied with
klee, kandinsky, and albers as a student at the bauhaus school. she was being taught at the same time that defining modern art texts were being written. in her works we can see when decades of modern art practice brings.
some of these important texts are:
paul klee's pedagogical sketchbook
wassily kandinsky's point line and plane
josef alber's interactions of color
jan tischold's the new typography
recently, i encountered multiple accessibility posts on table accessibility that reference the new typography.
these technologies are still relevent
another important chapter in this is not a pipe discusses calligrams.
in calligraphy, calligrams are often words forming shapes.
in foucault's analysis, calligrams are irreducible units of type and form,
think labels and axes, or <label> and <input> elements. they perform three functions:
augment the alphabet.
repeat something without the aid of rhetoric.
trap things into a double cipher.
Thus the calligram aspires playfully to efface
the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization:
to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to
look and to read.
data visualization is a typography exercise for folks like [ellen lupton] or [edward tufte]
that operate with same the principles as calligrams. we can interrogate meaning between
the type and form.
rising facism changed the site of art influence. many, europeans travelled to the united states. black mountain college was a major site of american cultural production.
In 1933 the Bauhaus closed due to pressure by the Nazi party, and Josef and Anni Albers were invited to teach at Black Mountain College. At Black Mountain, Albers led the innovative visual arts program until 1949. His courses emphasized experimentation with materials and color by doing simple exercises repeatedly and requiring students to rethink the ways they saw the world.
in 1965, Anni Albers wrote Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning.
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction is a modern art exhibit with several black mountain college
residents (eg anni albers, ruth asawa). this exhibit shows how textiles touch us all and connect us to history.
it is here that we find another confluence and computing.
first we observe marilou schultz's (Navajo/Diné), replica of a chip reminding us that textiles
and algorithmic practices connect with ada lovelace and the origins of computing history.
does this relate to a calligraphy? let me weave you a story.
the word “text” originated from the Latin word “textus,” which means “a weaving” or “a fabric.”
the museum of modern art is a museum and brand that frames enormous wealth.
it is an intersectional space for the concerns of art, data, and access;
some of them are relevent to our technical accessibility and data interests.
now video games are a relevent art and we can pull from their history to make accessible things.
i find that that video game accessibility guidelines inform my decisions when web content accessibility guidelines are unclear.
post-modernism and the death of the author in a connected world
technology was disruptive to the 1960s. it where we find the death of the author,
ted nelson's hypertext/hypermedia, doug englebart's the mother of all demos, and post-modernism.
anti-authoritarian by nature, postmodernism refused to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be. It collapsed the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture, between art and everyday life.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism
who makes the meaning? barthes contends that "to give a text an author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." this asks the author to consider the position of the reader relative to the work, and allows us to think how we can orient a text nearer to our viewers.
A frame is a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation, like being
in a certain kind of living room, or going to a child's birthday party.
Winograd (1974)
discusses the recent trend, in theories of Artificial Intelligence, toward
frame-like ideas.
jacques derrida deconstruction of kant's aesthetics parergon work around the work
parergon also means the exceptional, the strange, the extra-ordinary
this pull quote referenced in ellen lupton's elements of typography demonstrates
derrida's radical deconstructions.
the frame... disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.
the frame is in no way a background... but neither is its thickness as margin a figure.
or at least it is a figure that comes away of its own accord. jacques derrida, 1987
for derrida, the frame represents part of the work, it represents the work around the work, the omissions, the context.
the function of the work of art-any work of art-is to conceal the multiple frames within which it is contained
we're talking about the works framed by museums, but what is outside the frame?
the shock of recognition! in an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained- ignored. too many people know too much about each other. our new environment compels commitment and participation. we have become irrevocably involved wit, and repsonsible for, each other.
the guerrilla girls are an anonymous, international collective has that been making the nonvisible visible for years.
moreover, they are a statistics project elevating the un and under represented artists.
you can't believe what comes out of your mouth when you wear a gorilla mask
frida khalo of the guerrilla girls
the guerrilla girls gorilla masks disrupt the frame and regain power with the right mask.
all these histories feel deeply intertwined. remember that the guerrilla girls made the lack of women visible,
the whitney showed zero women artists,
and now we can find we find two woman of color showing simultaneously at the whitney.
progress!
¶
christine sun kim "all day, all night"
we are privileged to experience christine sun kim's art.
her position as a profoundly deaf audience gives us a glimpse into accessibility first art
and exhibition.
despite a lack of hearing, her exhibition is full of sound,
the musicality jumps along the walls and in between frames.
her framed visualizations use simple materials to communicate difficult information.
for example, several rooms included tactiles and braille:
christine sun kim might be familiar to y'all from her [ghosted] installation outside the university of washington's at Henry Hall
with an imagine of the christine sun kim's exhibition book in the foreground.
parergon also means the exceptional, the strange, the extra-ordinary
walking the frame's philosophical razor's edge let's us consider aesthetics without judgement.
one on side is pure outside with the percievable on the other. it is when we teeter along the frame
we can find the work around the work, the parergon.
along the frame we can work towards meeting people (the artist) where they are within their materials in their time and space.
it is here in a museum we can think of who is afforded access to these works, or not.
multiple frames start to reveal themselves in a very familiar way to the multiple frames in minsky's theories.
reproduction, or replication, allows us to stand on the frame, to do practice the work, and during
the process we find time complete sensory engagement.
art history is full of artists reproducing prior works (eg manet), not unlike the practice of homework or remaking data visualizations to understand the medium.
sturtevant is a unique modern conceptual artist with a restrospective at the MOMA called double trouble.
sturtevant's works look familiar, but they are not copies. they just look that way...
they are studies of the work.
sturtevant mastered each medium to create full ranges of works,
and documented the process in many media as it took shape.
sturtevant's art was all about the work, the process, and the medium.
all with an overarching question what if a woman authored the work? as all the works she reproduced were men.
making accessible technology using modern art techniques.
i'm encouraging y'all to get into the work. spend time making something
to activate your available senses. heightening these awarenesses helps
create more perceivable content, more accessible experiences.
modern art equals i could do that plus yea, but you didn't
we've demonstrated how modern art techniques can offer insight and engagement with a work.
we have access to all of art history, hell most of it is crammed in the browser, this places us at a unique time to make meaningful material and non-materials works.
hopefully, at this point, we've understood that some paintings are meant to be read and some are meant to be written.
we can begin to look at visualizations with soft eyes throught the work, we can go beyond reading visualization to viewing to making.
a truly assistive unit takes time, work, and practice.
digital accessibility is an exercise in text. make sure that the implicit is explicit in accessible contexts.
build from html basics. html is the most assistive standard for developers building accessible web content. using html semantics properly will get us closer the accessible solutions than going the javascript route.
learn what you can and cannot do with css.
learn your screen reader. you have at least one.
learn aria techniques to modify how visual information sounds while considering aria rules
how can we make data experiences more tactile, like tactile maps?
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what if we started thinking of visualization through glass?
how does external light interact with the glass?
what could shadows acheive in data representation?
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man ray's the enigma of isidore ducasse is a sew machine wrapped in blanket making
a nod to one of the earlist surrealist sentiments
as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table
Surrealism aims to revolutionise human experience.
It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.
The movement’s artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional.
At the core of their work is the willingness to challenge imposed values and norms, and a search for freedom.
in 1938, max ernst's the triumph of surrealism was antithetically renamed from "the angel of hearth and home".
really he like many artists of the time were depicting the spanish civil war,
and he was lamenting surrealism xx years after [andre breton's manifesto of surrealism.
a quote from max ernst on the work
this is a painting i made after the defeat of the spanish republicans.
it's evidently an ironic title to designate some sort of animal which destroys and annihilates everything on its path.
it was the impression i had at the time, of what was going to happen in the world, and i was right.
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